GoDaddy – WordPress Migration – How To

Moving WordPress websites is kind of a tedious task. I have moved over a 100+ of them in my 7+ years as a web designer. Today, I want to talk about a feature of GoDaddy which I think is really cool. Whenever you sign up for “GoDaddy’s WordPress Managed Hosting”. They have a feature that easily allows you to transfer all your WordPress data from your old server to GoDaddy’s server. Thus, you don’t have to install Snapshot or WP Clone onto your WordPress site and then transfer all your data to your new server.

In order to do this you need to login to your GoDaddy account.

Then click on “Manage Your Hosting”.

Click “Setup”.

Then, you have the option to click on “Create a New WordPress Site” or “Migrate Your Existing WordPress Site”. We want to click on “Migrate Your Existing WordPress Site” since we want to move our data from InMotion’s servers to GoDaddy’s servers.

Then you will get a form to fill out with the necessary data:

Make sure you copy and paste your temporary domain name into Textedit or whatever text editor you are using!

Site URL. Obviously, this is your websites url. For my example, I am using https://deaddogdesign.net (It is my web design business)

WordPress Admin Username. This is your username on your current WordPress login. A lot of people use “Admin” which is actually an unsecure way to setup your WordPress installation.

WordPress Password. Then you put in your WordPress password.

Host Location or IP Address. You want to put in your IP address in this field. To help you find your IP address please go to https://www.dnsstuff.com/ and then in the “DNSreport” field put in your domain name (example: deaddogdesign.net)

FTP Username. Enter in your FTP username. If you don’t know this go to your control panel and then FTP accounts and you can find it there.

FTP Password. Enter in your FTP password. You might want to reset it in cPanel or whatever control panel you are using just incase you don’t know it.

Then, all you do is click “Finish” and it should then cycle through and you should get a screen that says your transfer will take 30 minutes to 2 hours.

Tried & Tested – Migrate Your Existing WordPress Site

So, what I did is tried and tested this out for myself because I am going to be doing a GoDaddy evaluation in 2015. I am going to be testing our their hosting plans, since GoDaddy has requested that I give them another evaluation since my GoDaddy web hosting reviews don’t speak to highly of them.

So, I have followed all those necessary steps and I’m completely lost for what to do. “I get a Invalid WordPress admin username or password”. There is a number to call if you are having problems. I called them and the tech explained this to me:

What this GoDaddy WordPress migration tool does is go into your server and looks for all the necessary files needed to copy everything over to your new temporary domain. It installs a plugin and then migrates everything for you. There have been some plugin conflicts, but for the most part I am getting an error with the username and password. I told the tech “they are correct and all you have to do is go to wp-login on my site and you can login with the username and password I have provided.”

It does not work and I have went back and forth with GoDaddy on Twitter to try to get this matter resolved? I don’t know what to do about the migration other than use a WordPress plugin and manually do it myself?

So far it hasn’t been a fun experience. We are going on 2 days of trying to get this “simple” transfer over to their server. Have you used this “Migrate Your Existing WordPress Site” feature with GoDaddy? I would love to hear your comments down below.

Garen Arnold has 10+ years of web development experience. WordPress is used for all the sites he has developed and worked on. He has written 100's of articles on WordPress, SEO, social media, and has reviewed lots of hosts.

Similar issue. Except mine was “Invalid FTP user name or password”. I could connect by FileZilla with the FTP info given. Even spent an hour on the phone with GoDaddy support where they tried to do the same. No luck. They couldn’t even connect by FileZilla though. So I think it must be some kind of firewall / port issue on their side.

By chance, were either of you trying to migrate from WP Engine? I was attempting to move a dev site from my WP Engine account to GoDaddy, and it’s all been a horrible mess. WP Engine allows no “backup” plugins for security reasons, and GoDaddy’s migration “too” doesn’t work. So in the end, I just had to do the whole thing manually <- after hours of wasted attempts doing and troubleshooting the "easy" way.

Nope, I was trying to migrate from InMotion to GoDaddy. I just ended up using WP Clone, though. Not worth the hassle to go back and forth with them. I tried to get help from them, but they didn’t do much of anything.

I’m planning to move all my wordpress sites to GoDaddy for one reason. I currently have them with Fasthosts, however, I get a lot of intermittent 504 and 502 server errors. Apparently it’s down to Woocommerce requiring more php memory than they allow. SO,…. I checked out GoDaddy, who said that I can increase the php memory to whatever I like (up to 512mb). I only really need to increase to 164mb so this sounds great.

This memory increase is NOT available for the wordpress only hosting though. Only on their linux hosting pack. Which is a shame, as right now (yes, literally waiting for 31 minutes on ‘chat’ waiting for GoDaddy support!) I cannot use my tried and tested migration tool to transfer a single site! So far, I’m not happy!!!

I was on chat for well over an hour today with GoDaddy, and I’m so hacked off. I recommend the WordPress ultimate hosting to my higher end clients and have migrated sites w/o a hitch about a dozen times. The migration tool isn’t working on one client’s account…it does not even show me a screen for entering the FTP info….just the WordPress login info (which was a clue from the start.)

GoDaddy told me “sometimes it does not work” and that I’d need to move the site manually. Totally unacceptable. I use that hosting because of the migration tools and the ability to use a temp URL as a staging area to test everything before pulling the trigger.

Over 10 years of hosting client sites on GoDaddy and recommending it to clients, I don’t host, and this is how I get treated.

The support person was about as smart as a rock….no offense to rocks everywhere.

Yeah, GoDaddy seems to like to try to integrate tools into their service that don’t always work correctly. Hence, why I test them out all the time and I am constantly let down by GoDaddy. WordPress managed hosting is supposed to be easy. But, when it’s not why would you even want to use it.

As far as the live chat goes it is yet another “GoDaddy hassle”. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Never seems to work when you really need them.

I would suggest just leaving GoDaddy. You could show them this post, but doubt they really care enough to address the problem. I have asked them to drop by and leave a comment. They never did.

But, seriously don’t do business with them. It will save you some you some hassles and trouble.